Larry Riley: 10 years later, has anything changed?

Exactly 10 years ago to this day — Aug. 24, 2004 — then-Mayor of Muncie Dan Canan issued an executive order renaming the stretch of Broadway between downtown and McGalliard to become Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Boulevard.

The action effectively ended what had been a year of rancor followed by another six months of quieter inaction over a request to commemorate the civil rights leader assassinated in 1965, initiated by residents of Whitley.

Broadway bordered the neighborhood's western edge.

The president of the Whitely Neighborhood Association in February of 2003 called the existing memorial to King, the Tillotson Avenue overpass across the railroad tracks on the city's far southwest side, "out in the boondocks."

Then-city councilman Monte Murphy, council's sole African-American who also lived in Whitely, sponsored legislation to make the change, and the measure actually passed in June of 2003 by a 5-4 vote in front of a standing-room-only audience.

But afterward, as befitting a confused legislative body ineptly led, members disagreed on exactly what they had voted on. That led to a revote, and this time, council rejected the renaming, 7-2, only Murphy and fellow Democrat Bill Shroyer voting for the change.

For the rest of that summer and into the fall, public demonstrations roiled the community until the point that the U.S. Department of Justice assigned an out-of-town mediator to try to bring consensus to the community.

A 20-member citizen group, appointed as I recall by the mayor, including several elected officials, met for three months — never in an open session, I might add — to privately negotiate public policy with the federal mediator.

In December, 2003, the talks ended in an agreement that the group would ask city council to rename the street in 2004, and if council rejected the move, community mediation teams would continue pressing for the change.

Council did refuse, in early August of 2004, which seems odd in this political context: the 7-2 Democrat majority enjoyed deep support from Muncie's black community. Yet council voted again against renaming by 3-2, with three abstentions.

By that time somebody in this newspaper space had the temerity to point out that Indiana law gave only "the executive" the authority "to name or rename streets," not a municipality's legislative body.

The mayor's attorney disagreed with my reading of the law since council had usurped that power in the past.

(Photo: Provided)

Yet before another vote, some council members had asked the Indiana Attorney General for a legal opinion and he said they they were not empowered to change a street name, giving them an easy out.

As far back as the late 1970s, city officials were refusing to rename any street in King's honor. A proposal from a south side minister to rename Kirby was turned down on the ludicrous reasoning that relatives of Kirby might object. None were known nor were they likely to even know which Kirby this was (he was Thomas, a local civic leader circa 1838, for heaven's sake).

We weren't unique in this respect way back then or even just 10 years ago.

But the individuals who forged ahead in the face of rejection deserve applause for their persistence and our gratitude for their inclusivity.

King's commemoration is an example of "the public framing of memory" using "dedicated spaces and their connection to social values and meanings," which Hofstra University scholar Guillermo Caliendo called "sociospatial memory."

In 2011, Caliendo analyzed Muncie's battle over renaming Broadway in a scholarly article published by the Journal of Black Studies, and asserted that individual and collective racial identity is closely linked to "material forms of recollection."

Dedicating public space — a street, park, outdoor artwork — can produce a context for modern identity and in this case, commemorating a national African-American leader helps attenuate the exclusion of black experience and achievements from mainstream society's consciousness.

Recent events in Ferguson, Mo., come to mind, where a 94 percent white police force has virtually become an army of occupation over a minority majority suburb, which erupted into rioting protests and looting after a black teen was fatally shot by a cop.

We see how far we haven't come in the quest for racial equality.

Yet 10 years ago, then-Mayor Canan made the right call — and evidently concluded I was right about his right to do so — single-handedly renaming Broadway when city council wouldn't. Just 10 months earlier in his re-election, Republican Canan had lost the two precincts comprising Whitley to his Democrat challenger, now Muncie's mayor, by a vote margin of 681 to 101.

Here's the most mystifying aspect to the ordeal: Renaming Broadway was only one measure in the multi-part agreement.

In addition, the mayor was to establish a Public Safety Community Relations Board to educate the public and promote positive community relations, mostly for the police, and create an online "inquiry process" for citizens on the city's Web site. (Imagine had Ferguson, Mo., done this 10 years ago.)

And a "Neighborhood and Economic Development Corp." would be created. And a "mentoring" program for people wanting to serve on city boards and commissions.

Probably most important, a five-member committee was to be appointed in 2004 to found a Martin Luther King Jr. Institute, partly financed with public money.

None of that even got started. Must have come from somebody who had a dream.

Larry Riley teaches English at Ball State University. Email him at lriley@bsu.edu.